


you're a king, not a pawn, so cease

by telluricThanatologist



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Blood, Canonical Character Death, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Laughter During Sex, Tickling, Underwater Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-28
Updated: 2013-12-28
Packaged: 2018-01-06 11:11:06
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,748
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1106119
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/telluricThanatologist/pseuds/telluricThanatologist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Karkat moves on just a little, with help from a not-entirely-unexpected place.</p>
            </blockquote>





	you're a king, not a pawn, so cease

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Laylah](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Laylah/gifts).



> Thank you, my smart and excellent friend [sxizzor](http://archiveofourown.org/users/sxizzor/pseuds/sxizzor), for being my sharp-eyed beta reader! (Or should that be 'betta reader'?)

Karkat adjusts his grip on the silver-blue branch under his blunt, bitten claws for the sixth time in a row since he climbed up here in search of some quiet. He shifts his position on the branch, moving cautiously, sliding a little to his left with his breath held. The bark warps weirdly in response to his touch, glittering like smashed glass. He stiffens and swallows hard. After a moment under his wary eyes, it settles back into something mercifully solid-seeming again, slick and shimmery and _almost_ the same as it was a minute ago, though it now has a distinct tinge of pink and a swell of glossy bubble-like bumps where his grasping appendages had just rested. Karkat squints at the bumpy patch and raises an eyebrow, then grits his teeth and allows himself to relax slightly. 

He turns his face back up to the bizarre seafoam and purple sky that stretches far above his head. Only long, jagged slices and slivers of it are even visible beyond the canopy of the massive tree whose hundreds or thousands of other branches twist and curl into the air, eventually scraping at the clumps of cloud that mottle the sky. Or what he _thinks_ are supposed to be clouds, smeared and splattered like globs of overripe grubsauce in muddy, nauseous shades of yellow and green among faint red stars. It's nothing more than just a fake sky, at that -- a bullshit pipe dream made-up sky that's currently stuck at a few minutes before sunrise and, as far as he knows, only thinly covers up the roiling black nightmare of the Furthest Ring. Some freakish cluster of impossible eyes and teeth could be lovingly dragging its grimy flagella over the dream bubble's surface and leering down at him _right now_ and -- and god, he _knows_ the Horrorterrors probably couldn't be bothered to do whipping bugwinged fuckall to any of them, but it still makes him shudder to think about it. At the very least, he would be lying if he said he wasn't thankful to have the occasional opportunity to see something over their heads that _isn't_ the distant oily glisten of massive and revolting travesties with impossibly long tongues that Feferi would probably coo and gush over if she were still around. 

He guesses she still is out there somewhere, maybe a million times over, her and everyone else in a million different timelines. Only last year, he thinks, he saw her smile at him in that too-wide too-cheerful way of hers, her serrated teeth matching her blank white eyes. Like she couldn't be happier in spite of the string of catastrophes that'd dragged her there in the end. Maybe that's true. Shit, maybe there's a dream bubble just beside this one where she's just reliving the way things were before the game for a while, playing with the cuttlefish she pretended to raise, or talking to Eridan the way they did when they were still friends, or pulling all twelve of them into a memo without warning on Twelfth Perigee's Eve with the insistence that they just _had_ to watch some lame TV special together, because it was legally mandated on pain of culling but they'd been pretending it was just a tradition ever since they had just barely pupated--

He exhales sharply, and has to shut his eyes hard against the sudden ache that presses itself up behind them. 

With one slow breath, then another, he forces himself to recall his recent resolution to just stop thinking for a while. Maybe if he grinds it into his think pan hard and often enough, it'll stick. If he says so himself -- and he _does_ , whether or not anyone is around to listen -- it's one of the best ideas he's had in a long time. Not that he has a resplendent track record when it comes to decisions that don't nigh-literally drive the existence of himself and everyone around him over a cliff into a boiling pit of steaming, soggy hoofbeast fecal matter.

Wind stirs the branches, their motion leaving behind watery afterimages that hang in the air even after they still. He isn't sure he'll ever get used to travelling through dream bubbles. He isn't sure he _wants_ to. Everything glows a little (and he got several lifetimes' worth of freaky shit that was never meant to glow while he was playing Sgrub, please and thank you _not fucking kindly at all_ ) and moves in frames when he turns his head. Objects that seemed perfectly innocent seconds ago shift and flicker in his peripheral vision, making his bile duct churn before he either fixes his gaze back on them or looks away entirely. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees the sky to his right flare orange in the distance, and the fluttering violet leaves hanging just above his shoulder melt and stretch into long, razor-like cherry-red needles. (They couldn't be closer to the colour of that dragon cape Terezi has been wearing everywhere if the shades had been matched like paints. Maybe they _were_ unconsciously matched in someone's mind minutes or hours or days ago. The thought awakens a sharp pang in his bloodpusher and he starts to wonder where she is now before he pulls his thoughts back in, _no, no, don't think about anything, but especially don't think about anything to do with her_ ). 

Where was he? Oh, right, taking ugly clouds and the spines on trees personally like he's still convinced that the universe has a heaping sack of rancid grubmulch on reserve with his name and former address stamped on it, on standby for lobbing a greasy handful into his face the very second things actually seem to be coming up Vantas for once. That was before reality pulled his head out of his nook and impressed upon him once and for all that he and all of his accomplishments are just -- so vanishingly fucking small, and he wishes more than anything that finally knowing that wasn't such a relief.

"GRAND THRESHECUTIONER!"

He flinches again with a strangled yell, just barely catching himself before he falls. His eyes snap open just in time to see Meenah careen toward him and fall heavily onto the branch where he sits, landing hard enough to make it bounce ominously beneath them. She cackles at his surprise, low and throaty, before cheerfully linking her arm through his and leaning close enough that he could count every one of the way-too-goddamn-many jagged teeth lining the grin on her face. "'Sup, Nubs," she says sweetly.

"Meenah," he manages once his bloodpusher stops hammering, then hastily strings another handful of words together. "Um. Fuck, sorry. Hi. It's not that I'm not happy to see you again. But weren't you making another round to try to bring more of your old teammates around to your army? Our army, I mean," he quickly amends.

Meenah shrugs, unperturbed, in a weird rolling motion that shifts from shoulder to shoulder. "Ain't nofin stoppin' me from checkin' in on the abalonely glubfuck that's got his sponge all the way in around here. I thought you was takin' a nap and wanted space and waterever like you said, but _then_ I caught a look at you slippin' out of your hive and this is where you always end up. So I followed you, shrimple as that."

"You were worried about me?" In some dark corner of his think pan, he dimly notes two things: the words "Grand Threshecutioner" having settled heavy and warm over him, and the fact that her admittedly unsurprising knowledge of where he gravitates when he needs to deal with things alone... is something he doesn't find himself minding, somehow.

She looks him up and down, and her eyebrows scrunch together, garish fuchsia lips tugged down into a pout. "Aw, don't glubbin' tell me you're sulkin' aboat some chumbucket broody shit all up in my bubble _again_ , yo."

She almost sounds sincerely concerned. He won't question it. "No," he says. "Uh. Actually, I'm trying my best not to. To worry, or anything like that." He pauses. "Since when is it your bubble?"

"'Since these lame basswipes got in here thanks to me in the first plaice and since there's a hardcoral as fuck gold statue a' me in it and since I'm the eel beach who woulda ruled this galaxy if Beforus wasn't a shitty weakass mudball so I crabdicated's why it's mine, duh."

He can't help smiling a little, despite himself. "Fair enough."

She brightens -- literally brightens with the same surreal luminescence with which their environment buzzes -- before her smile drops again. "Okay, seariously, Shouty, lay it on me."

"What?"

"Oh my glubbing fuck, you can't be for reel. _What's got you clamming up by yourshellf in a huge cod dam tree in the middle of nowhere_ is what."

"The usual."

"The usual," she echoes. "Like what?"

"Didn't you ever wonder about, I don't know..." Immediately his familiar instincts to drop the subject, inch away from it, deflect, _stop seeming like such an insecure whiny douchefuck_ assail him on all sides. He steels himself and presses on, "I don't know how to put it. Like you should have just tried to remove yourself from things as much as possible from the start however you could. Like you're wasting your time wondering when or if literally everything is ever going to stop being so fucking hard. A lot of things, I guess."

She gives him an utterly blank look, then shrugs again. "Nah," she says serenely.

He sighs, rubbing his forehead. "Never mind. This is stupid."

"No, shoald on." She looks at him narrowly. "Let me get this strait. You still think you're not cuttlefish out for the job even though we just had a conversation about how leadership is shitty and thankless as fuck, and your fronds love you, and I hate to break it to you, except knot eely, but you care way too much aboat wetter you can live up to the position that was your condition for joining me."

He instantly fumes and scrabbles for a retort, but if he has the words, they chase one another out of his sight.

"That _is_ stupid as shit," she concludes archly, kicking her legs.

He doesn't miss the smug smile growing again at the corner of her mouth. He knows it's petulant, but he wishes it irritated him and is distressed to find that it doesn't. Instead a thousand other idiotic things are snatching at his attention, like her lazy slouch and the glint of gold in her eyebrow, and the way she's leaning into him, her stray ghost-energy or whatever the fuck setting his skin to prickling.

"How do you just _not think about that_?" he hears himself ask just before he realizes he's spoken out loud.

She snickers. "Angling to learn from the master? "

"No!" She starts laughing even harder, literally wiggling her feet, and he crosses his arms as well as he can, tangled up with her as he still is, because _he_ can pout too, damn it. "...Maybe."

She stops abruptly and rights herself, peering at him with intent. He makes it halfway through what might be a question, or a half-hearted complaint about _how_ close she is, or an apology for the uncomfortable subject, or all three at once when she swiftly catches hold of his face between her heavily bejewelled hands, puckers her lips, and kisses him long and hard.

Whatever inane drivel was spinning through his mind prior to that chilling, electric contact, it shorts out to static. He's vaguely aware that heat is rushing up his face. When she pulls back, her fins flare and flutter as she looks at him gleefully from beneath her glossy black eyelashes. "You're _adorabubble_ ," she sighs.

"Why--" The words stick in his shout sphincter. She tilts her head again and cocks an eyebrow, lips pursed.

"Why do you like me so much?" he says finally.

She makes a long, rude sound through her teeth, rolling her creepy filmed-over eyes extravagantly. "Holy fuckin' mackerel, because you're cute as glub like I just finished telling you and you worry too dam much and you're so sincere it krills you."

He stays silent, intensely aware that his blushing furiously isn't a thing that stopped being true or anything. "Shell you what," she says, sitting up straight and clapping her hands. "You gotta see my old hive."

"Your hive?"

"Yeah, my swank-ass giant fuckin' underwater palace! I know from extensive experience there ain't nothin' that cures what sails you like some luxury." 

He considers it -- surprises himself by considering it. By considering what the implications only an imbecile would miss, especially now that she's quirking her eyebrows conspiratorially, sharp-edged smirk in its rightful place.

...And it doesn't hurt, being looked at that way or being called adorable in that tone of voice, having someone else's mouth covering his, and that surprises him too.

"By the way," she adds, "that's an order."

For the second time that imagined morning, he can't resist smiling.

She uncurls her legs from the branch and throws herself backward, tugs him along with her, and they plummet.

His shocked scream is swallowed by the phantasmic ocean that rises to meet them.

He instinctively thrashes against the sudden crushing weight of the sea pressing on every square inch of him, a torrent of bubbles exploding from his throat. He twists wildly, and his sweatshirt unpeels itself from his thorax all at once. His tiny gills gasp to life at last, sending sweet clean oxygen thrumming through his body.

When his vision unfogs, the first thing he sees clearly is her. Her face is alive with surprised delight at the sight of his gills, at the sight of him in front of her, at the sight of him. She greedily reaches out to run her grasping appendages over his sides, grey tongue sliding over her lips -- and oh, _shit_ , he didn't know that would tickle so much. Her grin widens and turns even more wicked and she goes in for the kill, tickling him viciously until he doubles over, wheezing with laughter he can't suppress (doesn't want to suppress). Most of the sounds they make are pulled from their mouths in the form of silent, erratic spurts of bubbles, but he knows her raucous, shrieking laugh well enough by now to hear it in his mind just the same.

She takes hold of his sides and fluidly brings her face close to his again, her twin braids whirling around her. He lets her press her mouth to his again because he feels suddenly, deliriously light; and he lets her pull his sweatshirt over his head and let the sea sweep it away. In one agile motion she's discarded her own tee shirt, utterly un-self-conscious about the way her spheres shake as she gets to work loosing her billowing, jangling pants from around her hips. She sucks and bites at his bottom lip as he sheds his own pants; one of her teeth catches on the soft flesh and a ribbon of candy red flies free and he doesn't _care_ , couldn't care when her hand is snaking down his stomach, his hips, down to his swollen nook.

He looks at her over the tops of her glasses, hoping his silent question gets across. She guffaws again, nods vigorously, and abruptly grinds against him. He lets out a hiccuping gasp, rolling his hips as well as he can against her bulge, flushed brilliant pink and leaking weirdly beautiful beads of genetic fluid into the water.

She says something against his ear. After a second, she cracks up, having obviously forgotten where they are. She settles for pushing him away from her for a while, surprisingly gentle, and spreads her arms grandly -- and then vast, ancient-looking walls rise around them in the most _wonderfully_ fucking ugly shades of magenta and gold and purple, bedazzled to shit in the worst colour combinations for which Beforus _or_ Alternia has ever come up with a name.

She deigns to give him one, two, three full seconds to take in the grandeur before she pulls him back against her, but they both know it was never the point of coming here in the first place. And if he ever knew the exact reason why he'd thought that he could never get used to passing through dream bubbles, he can't think what it could be.


End file.
